For the last three weeks, Ugandan social media has been abuzz with parliament exhibition social campaign led by social activists of the Agora Discourse group.
Through the Uganda Parliament Exhibition hashtag, a lot of unfiltered information from the house has been leaked to the public alleging how public funds have been used by officials.
Ever since speaker Rt Hon. Anita Annet Among took over parliamentary leadership, she inherited the challenges of the previous parliament like nepotism and influence peddling by the MPs, staff and top managers.
As her new leadership was ushered in, most MPs influenced the deployment of their relatives, girlfriends and political supporters while others were dubiously promoted to the disadvantage of the most qualified staff which has created bad blood with the old staff.
There are cases where new staff and intern students have been helped by their relatives at parliament to sit internal job interviews meant for only staff and people at the human resource department allegedly drafting bogus contracts for the clerk to sign.
Top managers at parliament have been involved where they have also recruited their brothers and sisters and many of them got jobs as drivers, research assistants, office messengers and receptions.
As a result, some people feel they could have been used to sanitize the recruitment processes so that top managers could hoodwink the commission and employ their own people.
Senior staff members have been reshuffled from one department to another which has left them disgruntled and redundant. Some of these long-serving staff who had been serving in juicy departments were reshuffled or moved to offices they term as “dry” with little money to wet their beaks well. This has created an avenue for these disgruntled staff to leak information to social media much as the intention of the speaker carrying out these transfers and reshuffles was to ensure efficiency and continuity from the past regime, this has instead created bad blood between her and the affected staff who could be turning guns against her.
